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The award-winning author Amit Chaudhuri has been widely praised for the beauty and subtle power of his writing and for the ways in which he makes “place” as complex a character as his men and women. Now he brings these gifts to a spellbinding amalgam of memoir, reportage, and history in this intimate, luminous portrait of Calcutta.
Chaudhuri guides us through the city where he was born, the home he loved as a child, the setting of his acclaimed novels—a place he now finds captivating for all the ways it has, and, perhaps more powerfully, has not, changed. He shows us a city relatively untouched by the currents of globalization but possessed of a “self-renewing way of seeing, of inhabiting space, of apprehending life.” He takes us along vibrant avenues and derelict alleyways; introduces us to intellectuals, Marxists, members of the declining haute bourgeoisie, street vendors, domestic workers; brings to life the city’s sounds and smells, its architecture, its traditional shops and restaurants, new malls and hotels. And, using the historic elections of 2011 as a fulcrum, Chaudhuri looks back to the nineteenth century, when the city burst with a new vitality, and toward the politics of the present, finding a city “still not recovered from history” yet possessed of a singular modernity.
Chaudhuri observes and writes about Calcutta with rare candor and clarity, making graspable the complex, ultimately ineluctable reasons for his passionate attachment to the place and its people.
- Sales Rank: #1489940 in Books
- Brand: Brand: Knopf
- Published on: 2013-09-10
- Released on: 2013-09-10
- Format: Deckle Edge
- Original language: English
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 8.70" h x 1.20" w x 5.90" l, 1.01 pounds
- Binding: Hardcover
- 320 pages
- Used Book in Good Condition
From Booklist
While his portrait of Calcutta reads like the work of an erudite traveler, Chaudhuri (The Immortals, 2009) is a resident, and to him, Calcutta is “one of the great cities of modernity.” A renowned novelist and essayist as well as a musician, he is also a professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia, where W. G. Sebald also taught. Though Calcutta is nuanced, atmospheric, and deeply preoccupied with the past, it is not Sebaldian; Chaudhuri is lively, not melancholy. Amid anecdotes and information, he interviews natives and immigrants from every sector of society, including Indians returning from the West who find that they are not necessarily at home because they have changed, as has Calcutta—irrevocably. Who knew that Calcutta/Kolkata, the major city in the province of Bengal, had a democratically elected Communist government for decades? The Communists were responsible for making Calcutta “India’s most tolerant, multicultural, multireligious metropolis.” There are many reasons to read Calcutta. Perhaps the best is to see a global citizen’s view of the effects of globalization on a complicated, well-loved city. --Michael Autrey
Review
“Engrossing and impressive.” —Anita Desai, The New York Review of Books
“Fascinating. . . . Chaudhuri explores ideas of modernity and globalization in this essayistic appreciation. . . . [His] insider-outsider status allows him to probe the city’s eccentricities with both affection and unease.” —The New Yorker
“[A] lovely account. . . . [Marked by] the strength of Mr. Chaudhuri’s prose and the acuity of his observations. . . . [His] very personal story is a welcome contribution to the literature of the city. It also recalls another author who first set foot in Calcutta in 1962: V.S. Naipaul.” —The Wall Street Journal
“Equal parts memoir, literary history, sad-eyed sitcom. . . . [Calcutta is] rich in presence and sings a beautiful tune all of its own. . . . All the richer for presenting the city as a series of unexpected memory tugs.” —The Guardian (London)
“Chaudhuri’s writing has a strangely mesmeric quality, using the quotidian to draw the reader into the author’s mental world, his own way of looking. . . . His prose displays an ability amounting to brilliance for finding the right words to catch an emotion, a thought, a personality.” —Financial Times
“Simply stunning. . . . Calcutta should be mandatory reading not only for those unfamiliar with the place but for those who imagine they know it well. . . . Blending reportage, meditation, history and critique, it draws a fascinating portrait.” —The Independent (London)
“A complex patchwork of topics, scenes and even genres. It’s a crazy-quilt of a book that shows the author’s ear for reproducing speech and his knack for sketching not only personalities but also smells and, especially, tastes.” —Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
“India’s great cities have been the subject of many outstanding travel books and now it is the turn of Calcutta. [Chaudhuri’s] stories are spun out of a mix of history and family memoir, but the joy here lies in his digressions, his wanderings through the city, his remembrances and conjectures.” —The Sunday Times (London)
“Chaudhuri approaches his chronicle of the city of his birth with a practised eye.” —London Review of Books
“A splendid read; an introduction to a city, or confirmation of it; a meditation on expression and on [the author’s] own development as a writer. . . . Chaudhuri’s prose is delicious, his humour wry.” —Australian Book Review
“Beguiling. . . . Chaudhuri makes [Calcutta] sound like just the place to be.” —The Spectator (London)
“Concussed by the noise of the new and beguiled by echoes of the past, Chaudhuri maintains his novelist’s eye and ear for Calcutta’s character and citizens. He combines the serendipity of the flâneur with the sensitivity of the social historian.” —The Times (London)
“Chaudhuri is a writer, academic and musician. He uses his consciousness of all three in his narratives. He’s curious, he’s edgy . . . he’s incisive, reflective and sometimes poetic.” —The Tribune (India)
“Chaudhuri’s Calcutta has a different scope and intention to Suketu Mehta’s Maximum City (about Mumbai) and to William Dalrymple’s City of Djinns (about Delhi), but like those books, it succeeds brilliantly in making sense of a place few of us can know.” —The Observer (England)
“Unique and fascinating. . . . [Chaudhuri’s] masterful prose style lingers on the tiny, quotidian details and draws out their significance.” —Scottish Herald
“[Chaudhuri’s] most personal and perambulatory book to date. . . . [Calcutta] is a modernist canvas that mirrors the complexity and diversity of the metropolis itself and is in turn mirrored by Chaudhuri’s idiosyncratic style, blending autobiography, literary reportage, and personal essay.” —World Literature Today
About the Author
Amit Chaudhuri is the author of several award-winning novels and is an internationally acclaimed musician and essayist. Freedom Song: Three Novels received the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for Fiction. His many international honors include the Commonwealth Writers’ Prize; most recently, he became the first recipient of the Infosys Prize for Humanities—Literary Studies. He is a contributor to the London Review of Books, Granta, and The Times Literary Supplement. He is currently professor of contemporary literature at the University of East Anglia and a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.
Most helpful customer reviews
6 of 6 people found the following review helpful.
Too Often the Flavor of Calcutta Gets Lost in This Verbal Stew
By R. Schultz
The author introduces the reader to a wide range of Calcutta's characters here - from street stall owners to chefs in fancy hotels - from his family members to Mamata Banarjee, the woman who presented an alternative to the Communist/Maoist Party that had so long prevailed in the area.
Unfortunately, these individuals often get lost in a maze of run-on sentences crammed with subordinate clauses. Chaudhuri seems to be aiming at an imitation of Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." He ostentatiously lets every observation trigger a stream of consciousness in him, flowing back and forth and around - from Bombay where he was born, to present-day Calcutta, to the Calcutta of his youth, to Oxford and Norwich where he studies/teaches in England. He is impressed by his own presumed ability to notice every detail and to imbue it with import.
Reading "Calcutta" is like watching a loom whose shuttle has gone tilt. The result is something that might have been meant as a tapestry, but that ends up being more of a crazy quilt.
This kind of undisciplined style could be forgiven if the writer made up for it with a generally likeable, engaging persona. But Chaudhuri doesn't endear himself. He comes across as taking too superior an attitude. This is evident as he goes rather pointlessly from poll to poll on election day, asking voters if they think the election "will change things." He makes it clear all these contacts are interview subjects, to be harvested for their answers and then left behind. There's also his revealing reference to his wife, who is only identified as "R" in the body of the book. Chaudhuri starts one long reflection by saying, "By the time I married R..." A more inclusive, loving person would have referred to "the day we got married."
One passage will serve to illustrate these difficulties with the book. Chaudhuri finally gets around to visiting his mother's oldest friend, who is dying in a not-too-distant town. Chaudhuri launches off - "Shobhabazar is in North Calcutta; so the narrow lane in which Mini mashi and her elder sister lived doggedly in a government flat, a five-minute walk from Tagores' house in Jorasanko, two minutes from Mallickbari or the marble Palace, and not far at all from Mahajati Sadan, the playhouse; an area as littered with the relics of history as Shobhabazar is thriving (besides still being home to the obscure mansions of erstwhile rajas and landlords) with stalls selling wedding cards, saris, dress material - but predominantly wedding cards."
Then in the next sentences, he justifies not having visited Mini mashi sooner by pointing out that his own home is in the more industrially progressive southern part of Calcutta. So the voyage up north always loomed for him as involving "pushing in the opposite direction, of bracing myself to travel against the current." This is an odd, abstractly inhumane reason for not visiting a friend.
The topics Chaudhuri chooses to notice also seem a little too eccentric. He writes about the players and cheerleaders being imported from other countries to make up the newly popular football games in India. But he doesn't mention much about the poverty there. He writes about the difficulties Italian chefs face getting Calcutta citizens to appreciate "al dente" food. But he doesn't mention much about the ecology of the area. He talks about how delightful Christmastime in Calcutta is, but says little about water shortages or pollution.
Perhaps though, the obliqueness of Chaudhuri's observations is a good thing. The book certainly doesn't present the stereotypical picture of India as a teaming, steaming, impoverished country. It puts India in general, and Calcutta in particular, in a whole new light, as a place of unexpected daily details.
There are tigers of forceful ideas that will spring out at you from the undergrowth of this book. You're likely to find some reflective gems amid the slough of verbiage. Because of all its convoluted, padded sentences, this is a hard book to skim through in order to find such treasure though. You pretty much either have to commit yourself to reading the book thoroughly, or else forego it altogether. On balance, I`d say you'd be better off for the reading of it. It will take you along a different sort of passage to India.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
An Exile Returns to Calcutta
By Adam Rust
When I first saw this book, my initial expectation was that it would be a cousin to Maximum City by Sukethu Mehta, which is made up of the reflections of a man returning to Bombay. Calcutta is similar in that it is a very reflective book - somewhat in the spirit of work by V.S. Naipaul - and it is also written by a native who has left the country and now is returning.
But these authors have approached the question of their observed cities in different ways. Mehta spent a lot of time talking about the rule of law (little) and the unusual urban planning in Bombay. Mehta's book is really a book about a city.
Calcutta is less a book about a city and more a book about the passage of time. True, the title talks about two years, but the subjects at hand are instead the forces that have shaped the city over the last two or three decades.
Chaudhuri's contention is that Calcutta has slipped as a place. It is no longer the first city of India, as it might have been earlier in this century, and now a place that lies outside of India's new energy. Bombay has become a center of industry and finance, Bangalore symbolizes the nation's emergence as a high-tech hub, and Delhi holds the power of governance and culture.
He puts those changes on a variety of factors, most of which are political and cultural. He would seem to say that there has been a lack of intellectual competition in governance; the Naxalhites undermined the ability of the city to function and the Left Front stumbled when it should have been adapting to change.
Meanwhile, he questions how well the city's Bengali community has conceived of its place. While the Bengali language and customs dominate the cultural landscape, he says, the business of the city has been left to outsiders like the Marwari.
In all, he believes that Calcutta has stepped back. It no longer has a direct flight to Europe, its food veers toward syrupy sauces and poor imitations of Western dishes, and for the most part its world image starts with Mother Teresa. It is a country that people come back to in their later years, in order to care for their parents, and not as young people out to pursue a dream.
But it would be wrong to limit a review of this book to observations about Calcutta. The things that gave me the most enjoyment in this work were his reflections on his own path through this city. Chaudhuri spent his working life in English academia; now he considers himself an exile. He is an outsider. But as he visits with people, he draws out their lives to greater truths. I like what he takes from his time with a frustrated chef who cannot convince his customers to appreciate real Bengali food rather than kitschy imitations:
"It is a symbol of rural and urban Bengal's gradual lost of its past, with its delicate artisnal textures. This food was delicate. Now it is watery. For there's a thin line separating the delicate from the bloodless, in art as in food. Partly it has to do with the nature of Bengal modernity...which rejected the Hindu gods and goddesses and their antics in favour of an immanent radiance, and which, in the realm of the arts, preferred the implicit to the over-the-top, also kept its distance from strong and violent flavours in food. That modernity is on its last legs, as is its food. What was once implicit is now insipid."
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
The Realitries of Kolkata
By DH Koester
There are two cities in the world that have intrigued me since I was a little boy---Shanghai and Calcutta! I have now spent time in both--most recently Kolkata. I did what I could to prepare for the experience, reading multiple books, which helped develop my historical perspective and familiarize me with various parts of the city. But travel impressions, like beauty and art, are largely subjective in nature and Chaudhuris' are his own. Though interesting and sometimes instructive to read others experiences and feelings everyone has their own truth and to find yours re Kolkata you must go there--immerse yourself amongst the people, the segments of society--the poor and unfortunate--the lucky and privileged--the old, the young--the traditional, the modern--and do it not as a tourist but on a street level.
Chaudhuri gives us a somewhat analytical version of Calcutta. The truth---the true reality of Calcutta--- lies in the emotional version--and to get that you must go there!
DH Koester--"And There I Was" And There I Was Volume IX: A Backpacking Adventure in India
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